Luke 24:36-49
Rev. Laura J. Collins
May 4, 2003
Take a moment to look at your hands. Think about them.
Where they've been, the work they've done, the people they've touched ...
What do your hands say about you?
Now close your eyes. Think about hands which have held your hands:
a grandparent, a friend, a lover, a child ...
What do you remember about the hands which held yours?
Now reach out gently to your right and to your left and take hold of the hands of the people near you. Close your eyes again.
Whether you know these people intimately or not at all, think about the hands in yours.
Send a blessing through your touch.
Receive the blessing they are sending you.
Our women's retreat this past week began with a longer meditation on hands and we found that the power of thinking about hands stayed with us throughout the weekend.
Jesus said to his disciples, "Look at my hands ..."
When Jesus appeared to his friends, resurrected, they did not recognize him. Of course they didn't! He was dead! Maybe his appearance was altered, as well, because nobody recognized him at first.
Mary Magdalene thought he was the garderner.
Cleopas and the other disciple going to Emmaus thought he was a stranger until he broke bread.
Nobody could conceive that it might be him.
So he says, "Look at my hands."
He could have said, "Look into my eyes" or "Listen to my voice," but instead he said: "Look at my hands."
Of course, he meant at the wounds, the nail marks.
He wanted them to see he wasn't an imposter. And he wasn't a ghost.
He was really the same Jesus who had suffered and died.
He had the wounds to prove it.
But I wonder what else the disciples saw when they looked at his hands?
Did they see the blessings he had offered?
The children he had held?
The healing touch?
The broken bread?
"Look at my hands," Jesus said. And they knew it was him.
Then, my favorite line -- give me something to eat! I've never been brought back from the dead, at least in the literal sense, but I feel quite sure that if I was, these would be the first words out of my mouth!
Again, it was a moment of proof.
"See," Jesus was saying, "I am alive. This is not a vision. I am not an apparition."
But this action said much more than that. Because once again, they were able to break bread together, to share a meal, to participate in that necessary, but also very intimate act, of eating together, like family.
How many meals did they remember?
The day he ate with Zaccheus? Or the meals with Pharisees?
The grains of wheat broken in the field on a Sabbath?
The time he fed more than 5000 on the hillside in Galilee?
Maybe they thought, too, of his images of banquets,
so frequent in his parables of what it means to be part of God's community.
Now there is a line here which I adore ... it is very difficult to translate, so every English Bible says it differently, but one way is to say that the disciples "disbelieved for joy."
Disbelieved for joy!
I'm not sure what that means, but I can feel it!
The amazement, the confusion, the hope and doubt intermingled.
There is cognitive dissonance in this moment, but it is a joyful dissonance.
Twice this week I have read in the paper about families with missing children who may have had their child located after years apart. Can you imagine the moment when the mother first hears that her baby, gone two years or 4 or 6, might be alive?
Would she disbelieve for joy?
What about us? Have we known incredulous joy? Joy beyond imagining?
Joy beyond what makes sense? Joy so at odds with what we believed to be reality that it causes confusion, even as we experience it?
An impossible healing ...
An unexpected reconciliation ...
An experience of empowerment ...
"Look at my hands," Jesus said.
And they looked -- at the wounds and the blessings intermingled there.
The wounds that reminded them he had not avoided the danger -- he had faced it.
His death could not be spiritualized ... it was real.
His friends had run away when the nails were being pounded in, so they needed to look and see the wounds. These were his hands and when his friends looked at him, they could not avoid all the pain and all the joy written there.
Jesus told them, "You are my witnesses."
Look again at your hands.
What do you see written there?
What can others see?
Who have these hands touched, served, loved?
What joy have they received or given?
What have they witnessed to the world?
We are the body of Christ.
We are the body of Christ.
We are the body of Christ.
This sermon draws extensively on a sermon by Barbara Brown Taylor on the same Biblical text, "Hands and Feet" in her book Home By Another Way (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 1999).
I am also indebted to Fred Craddock's commentary on Luke's gospel in the Interpretation Series (Lousville: John Knox Press, 1990).
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